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I'm not sure if this would work for you, but I like Spotify's Discover Weekly. Every Monday you get a playlist of 30 songs that you've never heard before. I lis

I'm not sure if this would work for you, but I like Spotify's Discover Weekly. Every Monday you get a playlist of 30 songs that you've never heard before. I listen to it from beginning to end without skipping and I often find songs that I end up liking a lot

cr1895 9y ago
Release Radar published on Fridays is good too for new releases. It's always a nice perk during my week to see what's in these two playlists.
cocoflunchy 9y ago
I wonder if my account has a bug with Discover Weekly because ~50% of the songs I get come back over and over (sometimes as remixes or covers too...)
bluesroo 9y ago
> I listen to it from beginning to end without skipping This was the important part for me at least. There are a lot of songs that I think I'm not into. Once I forced myself to listen to all of them all the way through I found a lot of good stuff.
lghh 9y ago
Note that they are definitely not songs you've never heard before once you've been listening to it weekly for a year or two. After a while, it started suggesting some of the more popular songs by artists that are near the top of my most played artists.
nikanj 9y ago
Discover weekly is Spotify's key to that sweet payola, and it really shows. You can't remove songs from the weekly recommendation, and somehow it repeatedly gives you well-marketed artists completely outside your listening preferences.
- bhj 9y ago
  Another anecdotal data point: This has not been my experience at all. Its recommendations have gotten more obscure as I've liked/plussed those kind of things. It's more likely that you're encountering the limits of Spotify's library and/or algorithms rather than some nefarious payola plot. (I agree that being able to remove songs - or at least thumbs up/down similar to artist/album radio modes - would be nice)
  - eric_h 9y ago
    Absolutely. I actually started listening to discover weekly playlists without giving it any feedback and it started based on my previous trends and gradually drifted into the more main stream stuff. Once I realized I just needed to give its recommendation engine more fuel to work with and started liking/adding things I actually wanted to listen to, it went right back to giving me cool stuff with loads of obscure artists I'd never heard before but liked a lot. (It really only took me about two weeks to right the ship). Spotify's recommendation algos are excellent.
- tyleraldrich 9y ago
  Maybe it depends on the genres you listen to, but I haven't found this to be true at all. My discover weekly playlist is frequently full of bands I've never heard of with monthly listen numbers in the 2,000-50,000 range - I don't think those bands have marketing budgets.
- runeb 9y ago
  Either my playlist is the outlier or yours is, because this is completely opposite of what I experience in that playlist. Mine is pretty much all +20/30/40 years old "niche" music. Edit: And it almost always is something I really love. That playlist is the killer feature on Spotify for me at the moment.
- gmarx 9y ago
  I also haven't found that to be the case...maybe, I guess. I don't really know which artists are heavily marketed and most of what turns up for me is pretty old. Only exception that comes to mind was "blood in the cut" which I liked so
balladeer 9y ago
The problem with these online streaming services I face is that I try to use them mostly for one crucial purpose and that is recommendation - and they always fail to recommend anything that appeals to me. I want to find new songs, new artists that I would like. But these services never helped me with that. I don't like rap, hip-hop, or metal. I mostly like rock, some pop etc but that too not too loud. I don't really know how much "not loud"; that's where I thought these recommendation engines would kick in. I have found couple of artists/songs that I just love on Bandcamp (awesome place). But Spotify, Apple Music (this one has been an utter disappointment for me), and many other streaming services that I've tried in my country just didn't cut it. What have helped me over the years are films, blogs, tweets etc. Something random playing on a bus, or a film soundtrack, a TV show theme song. Like that song A Chi that I heard while watching The Best of Youth. It was in Italian and I didn't understand a word but I just instantly connected to it. I loved it. That German song from The Night Porter - from there I discovered Marlene Dietrich's Lili Marleen. Or Many a tears from October Sky, or that song from Twelve Monkeys. And there are some like Amélie (well, every tune is fabulous in this one) where I disconvered Guilty by Al Bowlly. A friend once, out of the blue, told me to check out Imagine Dragons and later I listenred to Demons like crazy; on repeat. Or a chance hearing of a tune in an Iranian film that was composed by an Iranian artist. It's the best song of melancholy I have ever heard and it doesn't have any lyrics. I even found some nice ones on WCD before it was burnt down. I got there late; or rather started exploring late. Its recommendations were a lot better than the streaming serives, at least for me. What I find surprising is that I benefit from recommendation services for books, films a lot, but for music I've never been able to find recommendation service that tries to find that nerve or even something close to it that is a person's musical taste and then recommends tunes around that. Maybe unlike books just the lyrics of a song aren't enough and it's very difficult to discern how a tune would sound good or boring to a listener. I've tried a lot and after some time I gave up. Maybe I was doing soemething wrong or I should try services that just to music recommendation, and not streaming maybe.
bbrik 9y ago
I also like their Release Radar playlist, you get new releases from the artists you follow.

cr1895 9y ago

Release Radar published on Fridays is good too for new releases. It's always a nice perk during my week to see what's in these two playlists.

cocoflunchy 9y ago

I wonder if my account has a bug with Discover Weekly because ~50% of the songs I get come back over and over (sometimes as remixes or covers too...)

bluesroo 9y ago

> I listen to it from beginning to end without skipping This was the important part for me at least. There are a lot of songs that I think I'm not into. Once I forced myself to listen to all of them all the way through I found a lot of good stuff.

lghh 9y ago

Note that they are definitely not songs you've never heard before once you've been listening to it weekly for a year or two. After a while, it started suggesting some of the more popular songs by artists that are near the top of my most played artists.

nikanj 9y ago

Discover weekly is Spotify's key to that sweet payola, and it really shows. You can't remove songs from the weekly recommendation, and somehow it repeatedly gives you well-marketed artists completely outside your listening preferences.

bhj 9y ago
Another anecdotal data point: This has not been my experience at all. Its recommendations have gotten more obscure as I've liked/plussed those kind of things. It's more likely that you're encountering the limits of Spotify's library and/or algorithms rather than some nefarious payola plot. (I agree that being able to remove songs - or at least thumbs up/down similar to artist/album radio modes - would be nice)
- eric_h 9y ago
  Absolutely. I actually started listening to discover weekly playlists without giving it any feedback and it started based on my previous trends and gradually drifted into the more main stream stuff. Once I realized I just needed to give its recommendation engine more fuel to work with and started liking/adding things I actually wanted to listen to, it went right back to giving me cool stuff with loads of obscure artists I'd never heard before but liked a lot. (It really only took me about two weeks to right the ship). Spotify's recommendation algos are excellent.
tyleraldrich 9y ago
Maybe it depends on the genres you listen to, but I haven't found this to be true at all. My discover weekly playlist is frequently full of bands I've never heard of with monthly listen numbers in the 2,000-50,000 range - I don't think those bands have marketing budgets.
runeb 9y ago
Either my playlist is the outlier or yours is, because this is completely opposite of what I experience in that playlist. Mine is pretty much all +20/30/40 years old "niche" music. Edit: And it almost always is something I really love. That playlist is the killer feature on Spotify for me at the moment.
gmarx 9y ago
I also haven't found that to be the case...maybe, I guess. I don't really know which artists are heavily marketed and most of what turns up for me is pretty old. Only exception that comes to mind was "blood in the cut" which I liked so

balladeer 9y ago

The problem with these online streaming services I face is that I try to use them mostly for one crucial purpose and that is recommendation - and they always fail to recommend anything that appeals to me. I want to find new songs, new artists that I would like. But these services never helped me with that. I don't like rap, hip-hop, or metal. I mostly like rock, some pop etc but that too not too loud. I don't really know how much "not loud"; that's where I thought these recommendation engines would kick in. I have found couple of artists/songs that I just love on Bandcamp (awesome place). But Spotify, Apple Music (this one has been an utter disappointment for me), and many other streaming services that I've tried in my country just didn't cut it. What have helped me over the years are films, blogs, tweets etc. Something random playing on a bus, or a film soundtrack, a TV show theme song. Like that song A Chi that I heard while watching The Best of Youth. It was in Italian and I didn't understand a word but I just instantly connected to it. I loved it. That German song from The Night Porter - from there I discovered Marlene Dietrich's Lili Marleen. Or Many a tears from October Sky, or that song from Twelve Monkeys. And there are some like Amélie (well, every tune is fabulous in this one) where I disconvered Guilty by Al Bowlly. A friend once, out of the blue, told me to check out Imagine Dragons and later I listenred to Demons like crazy; on repeat. Or a chance hearing of a tune in an Iranian film that was composed by an Iranian artist. It's the best song of melancholy I have ever heard and it doesn't have any lyrics. I even found some nice ones on WCD before it was burnt down. I got there late; or rather started exploring late. Its recommendations were a lot better than the streaming serives, at least for me. What I find surprising is that I benefit from recommendation services for books, films a lot, but for music I've never been able to find recommendation service that tries to find that nerve or even something close to it that is a person's musical taste and then recommends tunes around that. Maybe unlike books just the lyrics of a song aren't enough and it's very difficult to discern how a tune would sound good or boring to a listener. I've tried a lot and after some time I gave up. Maybe I was doing soemething wrong or I should try services that just to music recommendation, and not streaming maybe.

bbrik 9y ago

I also like their Release Radar playlist, you get new releases from the artists you follow.